Comment by solatic
7 years ago
It's like Vader asked Luke to join him in defeating the Emperor (Microsoft) and ruling the galaxy as father and son - and instead of the audience hearing "I'll never join you!!", we hear "sure, let's team up."
The cognitive dissonance is so strong here. WTF just happened? If you asked me a month ago to put down serious money in Vegas on this never happening, I'd have happily done so. What on Earth were they thinking?
IBM is basically taking it's failing Kubernetes distribution, saying "why lose when we can just buy the winners?", and went ahead and bought Red Hat and OpenShift instead. A year from now, we'll start to see heavy IBM integrations into OpenShift, radically increased licensing fees for RHEL to squeeze every penny out of enterprises which bought RHEL specifically because they need the support guarantees because they can't migrate away quickly, and every other Red Hat project - Ansible, Cockpit, Fedora, CentOS, etc., will get torn to pieces by IBM bean counters.
Red Hat shareholders just sold out. Goddamnit.
This announcement made me really sad. Red Hat was a company I admired.
I guess the only silver lining is that the buyer wasn't Oracle.
Ditto, I can almost guarantee I'll be in a meeting in the week or two where my directors will want to discuss the possibility of moving off of Redhat, at least as a contingency plan.
Obligatory link to one of the best rants ever presented against Oracle as an acquirer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=34m
"Do not fall into the trap... of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison... If you put your hand inside a lawnmower, it will get chopped off. The lawnmower doesn't care... The lawnmower doesn't want to kill open source. The lawnmower just can't think about open source. The lawnmower can't have empathy."
Or Microsoft (who, after all, <heart>s Linux).
I share the sentiment.
Gawd. Freaking. Dammit.
I've been using RHEL-derived systems for like almost 20 years. This actually feels like a betrayal of the Open Source community.
Any bets on whether Fedora and CentOS will exist in November 2019?
The boilerplate and vague statement of Red Hat remaining a distinct unit doesn't really tell us anything. More relevant is what the CentOS and Fedora communities think of this acquisition, because no matter what they are community driven projects.
There are two coins to toss: whether IBM reaches into Red Hat in a way that kills off either project; and whether enough of the community steps out.
I'm curious what openSUSE folks think of SUSE having been acquired by Novel, then Attachmate, and then the Micro Focus merger. They've been through a lot, and openSUSE is still here.
Conversely, I wonder what this does to the Linux ecosystem. It looks like at this point, Debian and Arch are the only major self-sufficient distros (i.e. not built on top of another distro) that are still community-owned and community-driven; and of the two, Debian is clearly more broadly popular. So, will this result in Debian becoming the de facto standard of "open Linux"? This could make things interesting when it comes to packaging etc.
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Regarding openSUSE (I work for SUSE so obviously don't speak for the wider openSUSE community, just my 2¢ as a contributor):
While people do have a reasonable level of hostility over the Novell acquisition (which has left some deep cultural scar tissue within SUSE), they did give us openSUSE.
Overall there is often worry when we have an acquisition (since a very large portion of openSUSE maintainers are employed by SUSE). With EQT quite a few folks were worried about how separated the finances were between openSUSE and SUSE and I believe Richard Brown commented on how exactly he's pushing for better financial and trademark separation (the only two things that they really share anymore).
So while people do get worried every one in a while, I get the impression that overall things are going okay despite the series of acquisitions in recent years.
However, Fedora/RedHat have a different structure and relationship and I wouldn't use the openSUSE/SUSE model to predict how things will work out.
I wonder if the Fedora community could immediately fork off their own and essentially "leave" IBM/RH hanging? Not even sure if that is legally possible now, as the terms of the sale could have potentially included looming/upcoming license changes that might prevent that. I'd say they'd have to act quick and with their general feeling on whether they'd want to go that route (the Fedora community), and I'm sure their would still be legal challenges from IBM in any case if they attempted something like that.
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> I'm curious what openSUSE folks think of SUSE having been acquired by Novel, then Attachmate, and then the Micro Focus merger. They've been through a lot, and openSUSE is still here.
OpenSuSE has been more like Fedora over their years; they historically never had a CentOS equivalent (although the newer OpenSuSE is moving there).
OpenSuse still rocks it.
Where’s the history of IBM buying and sun setting companies? I don’t have the same prejudice towards IBM that I do for Oracle. But I’m not in a position to know.
I’m thinking RHEL’s support contracts will keep IBM from shuttering RHEL. An IBM branded RHEL would represent plenty of income.
Rational Rose, Lotus
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They can cancel many projects that RedHat do as a general giving back to Linux. IBM wouldn't care.
Sequent, though I can't see them doing the same things to RH.
ISS?
SPSS comes to mind.
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WeatherUnderground was effectively shut down post-purchase. API signup is gone, etc. Terrible transition and no support for prior products.
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>Any bets on whether Fedora and CentOS will exist in November 2019?
I would say that Fedora and CentOS aren't going away anywhere. Not because of this anyway. There were similar concerns around RH's acquisition (if that's what you call it) of CentOS a couple of years ago, but things have largely been the same. And it's mostly for selfish reasons. The overall dev mindshare of RH based systems has shrunk compared to Ubuntu. So anything that moves people away from Ubuntu to the RH ecosystem is net win because eventually some corp will write a check when they need support. It's the same idea as MS not going after pirates just to increase MS's overall market share.
> I would say that Fedora and CentOS aren't going away anywhere.
That was the sentiment regarding OpenSolaris when Oracle bought Sun... (And I can't believe no one's mentioned this in 800+ comments so far.)
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Not a huge fan of Redhat, but I am a big user. I'm willing to wait and see.
Maybe we'll see more community offerings?
What is the relationship between RHEL and CentOS?
Never actually used RHEL, but I've heard that they're basically the same - one comes with the support, the other obviously doesn't.
Is CentOS supported by Red Hat, so IBM in theory could shut them down?
CentOS is the main competition to RHEL licenses. I have been in many meetings where the "use CentOS so if we have to buy RHEL its an easy conversion " was made
I assumed Redhat was going to capture lost revenue by somehow making CentOS less viable.
IBMs business nature makes me think its even more likely now.
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I can't find the reference, but Red Hat recently hugged CentOS after sort of passively ignoring it for a while. Now, as I understand it, Red Hat has committed to actively supporting CentOS.
They're different products for different customers. Folks who want to work cheap and hack their own stuff together will use CentOS and would never have bought a RHEL license anyway.
Meanwhile, folks who need a "we've got support" answer for every question will use RHEL and wouldn't be tempted by CentOS anyway; the cost savings is not worth the risk.
redhat owns the centos trademark and employs most of its developers.
Fedora and CentOS will both survive -- but maybe under a different name.
This is possible because everything in Redhat/Fedora/Centos is open source.
I'd be willing to bet numerous people are working on a non IBM/Redhat version of Centos.
That's the thing with an acquisition like this: what did IBM buy exactly? The code is open source, the people can leave and form a new company. The thing IBM really owns are Red Hat's contracts. But when those expire, the other party could sign their new contract with a company of former Red Hatters, if they want.
Buying an open source company only makes sense if you give the employees of that company exactly what they want. They are the real value.
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Donated to Apache...
zOS reboot, duh!
Kidding aside, nothing about this is good for the open source movement.
See you in RHEL.
> Red Hat shareholders just sold out. Goddamnit.
RedHat is a public company, in what fantasy land do you exist where this isn't expected?
Furthermore, the deal is still subject to shareholder approval:
> The acquisition has been approved by the boards of directors of both IBM and Red Hat. It is subject to Red Hat shareholder approval. It also is subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions. It is expected to close in the latter half of 2019.
So you really should be complaining that RedHat's board of directors just sold out, and that's their fiduciary duty.
Selling out is not necessarily the “duty” of the board of directors. It could definitely be in the interest of shareholders to stay independent.
Agreed. The board's fiduciary duty is to do what's best for the stockholders.
> Red Hat shareholders just sold out.
The Red Hat board were offered a massive premium on an already generously-priced stock. If they hadn't sold there probably would've been lawsuits left and right.
The deal is subject to shareholder approval. I think based on that approval, you'll be able to estimate how right or wrong you are about lawsuits had the board rejected the offer.
RHT is $20 billion in market cap as of Friday, and the offer is $34 billion.
As soon as I heard this news, I was looking to invest in SUSE until I found out they were just bought by a private equity firm earlier this year.
What's going on with Linux providers? Is Amazon really just dominating the space?
SUSE has been acquired many times in the past several years (Novell, Attachmate, MicroFocus). In theory, EQT will help us "get back on our feet" in terms of self-sufficiency but how things will actually pan out is obviously still unclear.
[Disclaimer: I work at SUSE.]
Ubuntu (Canonical) just stared looking more attractive as they were trying to be an independent commercially-supported Linux offering.
Or, if you don’t like Canonical (and to be fair they do a lot less than Red Hat do), encouraging corporate users to sponsor Debian directly would be amazing.
I'd rather corporate users sponsor Arch. My guess is Canonical will be announcing they are getting acquired by Microsoft soon.
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no, but most cloud providers are not opensourcing their contributions to linux.
Is that really true? The big three cloud providers all have commits to the Linux kernel:
~/linux master ● $ git log --author=amazon --format='%h %s%n %ad, %an <%ae>' --date=short | grep @amazon | wc -l 206
~/linux master ● $ git log --author=microsoft --format='%h %s%n %ad, %an <%ae>' --date=short | grep @microsoft | wc -l 1825
~/linux master ● $ git log --author=google --format='%h %s%n %ad, %an <%ae>' --date=short | grep @google | wc -l 11283
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Well, at least my shares of DEBN just shot up.
Which went up because.... it's now seen as an acquisition target as well?
Edit; ah sorry I didn't know...
I think mindslight is joking; Debian is not a company, it can't be bought.
Hopefully this will cause an uptick in Gentoo (and OpenBSD)!
Yup, since I switched to FreeBSD year or more ago it makes watching news like this much less stressful.
Curious why Free>Open, for your usecase, as I'd like to learn more about them.
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And Arch Linux.
I love arch, I was using it for over 10 years in a row, but it uses systemd now 'owned' by IBM.
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Yeah, 10 years down the line RHEL is pretty much guaranteed dead. Probably say goodbye to Fedora as well.
This is sad, Fedora has been my favourite distribution for a little while. Red Hat have been a good community player and it is a big loss for them to be gobbled up by IBM. What is the best alternative to Fedora and CentOS?
The obvious alternative would be Ubuntu. The LTS releases are alternatives to RHEL/CentOS. The others are Fedora alternatives.
However, Red Hat is _far_ more than RHEL. They actually build a ton of OSS that's used in RHEL and elsewhere. Ubuntu does little more than repackage Debian. That's not a criticism. They package well, and they know how to polish. But there's no replacement for Red Hat as a company.
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NixOS due to its excellent community and quality.
Debian is solidly community based. Ubuntu depends on Debian in order to add its own value on top.
I only used tried-and-tested distros like Yggdrasil.
I'm sticking with Fedora - too early to tell.
Too early to say what will happens with Fedora and other RH products.
DragonFly BSD
But Red Hat/Fedora has been a huge contributor to very basic Linux ecosystem things which everyone benefits from, like the freedesktop standard stuff and more.
I wonder how this change will pan out across the entire Linux-sphere. I’m wondering and I’m trying not to be pessimistic.
public companies are beholden to their shareholders. Enough shareholders liked the premium they were being offered...
It's not good, but it's the peril of most public quoted companies.
Public companies can have multiple classes of stock with different voting rights. Private company can be sold.
Sure they can, but most public companies (absent places like Facebook, which IIRC has a setup which favours Zuckerberg heavily) are more susceptible to being forced to sell whether they want to or not.
Private companies (especially one's who aren't beholden to VCs or similar) have the option to say no, regardless of how much money they're offered.
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I think it is more like Frontier buying phone lines from Verizon so they could temporarily reduce their free-fall in revenue.
Two or three years from now IBM will be the next GE.
> Red Hat shareholders just sold out.
Might be going out on a limb here, but maybe that’s why they bought the stock, so they could sell out at a profit?
Defeting aws not ms. And projects like ansible and cloud formation / manage iq are the weapons
> The cognitive dissonance is so strong here.
Where? Can you give an example of an expression of cognitive dissonance here?